61–70 of 218 posts
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It's the isolating arm of capitalism drilling its elbow grease directly into your personal life.
Now think about what a company like Google or Facebook knows about you. And then ask yourself if you ever want to use their services again (besides those that everybody is forced to "use", such as GoogleAnalytics.).
It doesn't sound like Dell has been very effective here: likely attackers downloaded the database raw or it's one of their many contractors who log in remotely. Last time I saw that interface it was a web form that someone could access from any machine! This is serious. If you have customer data, you need to log access to that data, and you need to audit access to that data, and (very important!) you need to have a z…
But as long as they come and cry on stage about how we should trust them and help them make the world more "open and connected" I guess it makes it okay.
If the NSA, Sony and the Director of the CIA can't protect their data, how am I supposed to realistically ensure less educated\tech savvy family members, customers, employees protect theirs?
Even if everything leaks, and there is a story everyday of the week for anyone paying attention, things have become too big to fail.
It's like the Steve Carell character says at the end of the 'Big Short' - "There's going to be a bailout. They knew the taxpayers would bail them out. They just didn't care. And in a few years we'll go back to what we were always doing...blame the immigrants and poor people"
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Now think about what a company like Google or Facebook knows about you. And then ask yourself if you ever want to use their services again (besides those that everybody is forced to "use", such as GoogleAnalytics.).
Well, I block GoogleAnalytics with uBlock and uMatrix.
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Assuming an averagely careless programmer, a language made out of shotguns will produce more errors than a language with the occasional presence of shotguns. When simply trying to concatenate 2 strings can result in arbitrary code getting executed, memory leaks, actual data-loss or fatal program instability (or all of those), it's pretty obvious the C language itself is made out of shotguns. Making simple things simp…
> it's pretty obvious the language itself is made out of shotguns. You are hitting the hammer where there is no nail! In this instance, the Dell WEBSITE was hacked which are (99% of the time) written in high-level programming languages like php, python or Java. No sane business uses C/C++ to develop a website. C/C++ is used for INTERNAL SYSTEM PROGRAMMING and those systems are already linux based and almost impossibl…
Pot. Kettle. Black.
> In this instance, the Dell WEBSITE was hacked ...
I saw absolutely nothing in the article that could even remotely be considered proof of this.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Assuming an averagely careless programmer, a language made out of shotguns will produce more errors than a language with the occasional presence of shotguns. When simply trying to concatenate 2 strings can result in arbitrary code getting executed, memory leaks, actual data-loss or fatal program instability (or all of those), it's pretty obvious the C language itself is made out of shotguns. Making simple things simp…
C doesn't even have strings, but you would typically be using char arrays instead. All you need is a pointer to the array in order to access it. However, if you just have the pointer then you are lacking to essential pieces of information, the length of the string and the capacity of the string. The length of the string is however by convention determined by the first NULL byte (zero termination), so it is important…
In theory, string handling in C is straightforward enough. In practice, string handling in C is the source of a crazy number of security vulnerabilities and other bugs, even in popular and relatively well regarded software written by experts.
No-one should still need to use C in 2016. We know how to fix many of its problems and create much better programming languages now. Unfortunately, there is so much momentum behind the C ecosystem that in reality there are few practical alternatives yet, at least for low-level systems programming or high-performance number crunching work. Worse, there may not be enough commercial justification for the few organisations big enough to significantly move the industry in a better direction to actually commit the resources to do so, and this seems unlikely to change unless and until influential people start to care about the real costs of poor quality software.
The title should really be changed, there is no confirmation they were hacked. I have an equally plausible theory -- You used the same username and password somewhere else that got hacked, or your credentials were stolen through some infostealing malware. Account takeover is a huge problem these days, it wouldn't surprise me if there is a tool out there written specifically to validate combo lists against Dell's webs…
I reported this to Dell and got back a very dismissive, abrasive email saying something to the effect of "Well how else are we going to let people unsubscribe?", claiming that they had no other legal option. I just changed all my info to junk and left it at that; eventually they closed that hole, but it wouldn't surprise me if some site exists that still allows people to harvest anybody's information from Dell using nothing but their email address.
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We can't be too far off from a China-style 'citizen credit rating' kind of system.
It already happens unofficially. How do you think banks assess your lending/borrowing habits when you apply for a loan? There are detective agencies who track credit cards and other things (like a few examples someone gave in this very thread).
European living in the US here. How do these systems assess recent immigrants who have no credit history in the US?
The title should really be changed, there is no confirmation they were hacked. I have an equally plausible theory -- You used the same username and password somewhere else that got hacked, or your credentials were stolen through some infostealing malware. Account takeover is a huge problem these days, it wouldn't surprise me if there is a tool out there written specifically to validate combo lists against Dell's webs…
He mentions using two-step verification though. That doesn't mean it's not possible, but that makes a lot harder to get into his account.